I'm blogging from Seattle Mind Camp 2.0. The first session I intended involved Search Marketing. It was pretty informative, there was a good mix of people who wanted to drive traffic to their site (e.g. PixPulse), people with experience providing Search Marketing Solutions (e.g. Larry Sivitz at SearchWrite), along with a Product Manager from MSN adCenter.
The founder of PixPulse, an MySpace/Flickr mobile photo sharing service had a lot of interesting experiences to share around his use of PPC to drive user acquisition. He claimed that he was able to acquire users for as low as $.60 a user, which is quite good. He also indicated that content based ads, e.g., AdSense, were far less efficient than search based ags, e.g. AdWords, in his experience. He blamed link farms and click fraud as the major reason for this.
An employee from HelpShare, an online question & answer community, talked about how making their database of previously answered questions available for free has actually driven more business value. This theme of opening up as a way to drive more value was echoed other, such as, a local Seattle Real Estate blogger.
A product manager from MSN adCenter outlined the advantages of adCenter over Google AdWord/AdSense. I was impressed with the added flexibility that adCenter provided. For example, adCenter gives you the ability to pay a premium to reach a targeted demographic and run your ads during certain times of the day. Very powerful and cool.
Google Analytics isn't well regarded based on the comments of people who attended the session. Primarily because GA tends to slow down page download times significantly.
I hope to post a podcast of the this session later today.
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